Two days after Christmas 2003: A man walking his dog through the woods on Whidbey Island in Washington state spots a yellow Chevy sports utility vehicle, its door open, its driver with a bullet in the head.

The victim is Russel Douglas, 32, and when police search his cell phone records, according to court documents, they find that he has recently been in touch with Peggy Sue Thomas – a 6-foot-tall, single mother of two who was crowned Ms. Washington in 2000.

She won the evening gown division at the national competition, where she proclaimed, according to a profile in the Seattle Weekly, that the greatest ethical challenge facing women was “raising children with morals, even with all the violence, sex and drugs in the media.”

Years after she graced the national stage with that sobering message, prosecutors alleged that she lured Russel Douglas, the estranged husband of a longtime friend, to the woods under the pretense of giving him a Christmas gift. There, investigators claimed, her lover shot Douglas point-blank.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998. Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: Read More